Building Custom Material & Component Libraries for 3D Modeling in SketchUp

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. My name is Victoria Wilson. I'm a designer and digital creator and a teacher here on Skillshare. I've been working with sketch up for many years now, and it is one of my go to programs for designing and creating when it comes to interior projects. I'm very excited to share this class with you after doing my Mastery Foundation series. In this class, we're taking it a little step further, and we're diving into creating custom libraries for materials and components. So in this class, we're going to talk about why stuff like this is important and how it can benefit your three D modeling practice and make things run more efficiently and quicker and just speed up your process and make it easier overall. We're going to create some materials together from scratch, using some real world examples for paint and tile. And then we're going to build a few components together and look at putting all of that together. With the materials and components to create something a little more. I'm going to show you how to start these libraries, get them all set up, and then fold them into sketch up so they are quickly and easily referenceable on your material and component panels. So I hope you get a lot out of this class, and I can't wait to see the projects you create. 2. Class Resources & Project: In the projects and resource section of this class, you're going to find a folder down here that has a basic starter model, some image references, a couple of sketch up materials, and a couple component models to get you started. But by the end of this class, you'll have plenty more. In this section, you'll find the information you need for what I want to see in your class project. And if you click Read More, you'll see all of that. So here you can find a link for the Sheryl Williams 2025 Color of the paint palette. And this is what I'll be using as a reference to create some custom materials. You can follow along by clicking this link and going to the website to see those colors. You'll see that in another lesson. Or you can choose a different paint source, a different image source to create some custom materials. But if you want to follow along, I figured I'd give you this link, so you can use the exact same things that I'm using just to get you started. Now, for your class project, what I want to see is I want you to create some custom materials, either matching mine that I created in the class or creating new ones on your own. And I want you to create some custom components, once again, matching mine in the class or some on your own. And I want you to come up with a creative way to present your new materials and components. You can share screenshots of your new collection setup. You can share screenshots of your model view, or you can use the export feature and export view of your model. And when I say get creative, let's talk about some ideas. You can create a variety of shapes to apply your new materials to. Maybe you want to create a bookshelf that has some different decor pieces and different materials applied. Or you can use my example here and create an interior design sample board that showcases some different components and some different materials. Some of these I made in the class, and some of these components I made separately. You can use a room. Maybe you want to create a whole room that has different component elements and different materials. There's so many things you can do, and I really want to encourage you to get creative, be unique, put your own personality and your own spin on this, and show us the things that you've created from what you learned in this class. 3. Reminders & Notes: All right. So before we get into the good stuff for this class, let's go over a few little reminders to get us started. So I'm currently working in sketch pro 2021 on my Windows PC using version 21.10 0.332. If you're not sure which version you're currently using, you can go to the top menu to help and about sketch up, and this will tell you what version that you're using, different versions may look a little bit different. That's why I wanted to bring that up. And if you have seen my previous classes, then you may remember me talking about using a three D mouse. This is a staple for me at this point, so I'll be using it during this class too, and I'm assuming future classes. There's a link for the three D mouse that I'm using in the class description. So if you see me moving around a model like this, and you don't see me using orbit or zooming in and out with the mouse wheel, then that's what I'm using. I'm using the three D mouse. I highly recommend getting a three D mouse. For me, at least, it makes the whole process move smoother and faster, and it saves your finger from constantly scrolling and clicking to move around your model. If you need a refresher on some of my basic foundational skills for sketch up, be sure to check out the first three classes in my sketch up Mastery Foundation series. In part one, I covered a lot of the basics on how the program is set up along with some of the drawing and modifying tools that you'll need. In part two. I covered using components and groups, materials, tagging layers. Section cuts and more. And then in Part three, I covered things like shadows, styles, watermarks, fog, along with some of my top efficiency tips. So that's all I have for reminders. And let's dig in to the full class now. 4. What Are Custom Libraries?: Okay, so when it comes to collections of materials, components, and even styles, the possibilities are endless. Having access to these libraries or collections help to speed up your overall process. It means you're not having to spend time making these things over and over every time you need something. Instead, you're just pulling from the custom library that you've built. The three D warehouse from SketchUp is a great resource when you're just getting started, when you're short on time, and sometimes when you're looking for something specific for a manufacturer. But the three D warehouse can be hit or miss, and it doesn't have to be your only resource. You can start building your own custom libraries over time and just continue to grow them and just add more and more to them. You don't have to do it all at once. So in this class, we're focusing on our material and component libraries specifically. And let me just give you a little tour of some of mine. If we're looking at components, I've got a whole bunch of components that I have built over the years that makes it really easy for me to come in and pull from. I don't have to build these cabinets every time I need one. I can just pull from here. Same thing with plumbing fixtures. I've got a selection of faucets I can use let's look at lighting. So I've got some two D and three D lighting, and some of this is stuff that I've built from scratch and some of it's from the three D warehouse, and some I've started from the three D warehouse and then modified to be what I needed to be. So there's a good mix. Same thing with materials. If we're looking at that, I've got a library just for construction documents style materials. But then I also have things like paint, where I've pulled in from Sheran Williams, created my own library of materials from there, or maybe let's look at tiles. So I've got a selection of tile materials that I've created. And as I create a new material or create a new component, I'm adding it to my library so I can use it for future projects, so I don't have to build everything that I need every single time over and over again. So here's a little peek into just one of my folders of lighting components that I've created. These are two D. But just like the ones I showed you in sketchu itself, this is behind the scenes of the folder on my system, where I house all these models that I then turn into components. So let's look at building these for yourselves. In the next lesson, we're going to get started setting up the file locations you need to manage your library resources that you're going to start creating. 5. Setting Up a Location: Okay, so in this lesson, we're going to be taking a look at how to set up the file locations for your material and component libraries and for references. And this will be what sketch will pull from for the different libraries we'll be creating. So to start out, I'm going to point out the class resources. This would be the perfect time to download the class resource files. If you haven't done that yet. In the class resources, you'll find a basic model, which is what we'll be using throughout the class to create things. This is just a basic getting started type of thing. But I've also given you some image references that we're going to look at to turn into materials. So you've got this one. It's like this is a patterned image that I created to use as like a wallpaper. There's a couple of tile samples, a hardwood floor image, and a couple of images for paint. And then you'll also find a couple different sketch up materials that I've turned those images that I've given you into materials, and we'll look more about how you do that. Then I've also thrown in a couple of different little components just to get you started. So we're going to use these to create our own libraries on our systems. So now that you've got that, take a moment, download that if you haven't done that yet. And then I'm going to show you what my current setup looks like. So this is my current file location for my libraries. So I've just got a folder on my computer called SketchUp Library, and then inside of it, I've got an archive folder for just like the random things that I've collected and no longer need. They just kind of go there, a custom folder. So in this, this is anything and everything that I've pulled in for different resources. Whether they're Photoshop files, affinity files, images of materials. I've got PDS from manufacturers. I've got folders from manufacturers, anything like that. This is just that custom, you know, landing zone. It's just where everything just kind of ends up. And then I've got material references. This is more of like the finished material images that I use to pull from. So I've got a folder set up for affinity files. And when I say affinity, I'm talking about Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo. You can also use Photoshop or even Canva or anything like that to create material references. And we'll look at doing that together in a later class. But right now, let's just look at this. So this is just kind of the dumping ground for some of those resource images, the references for I've got tile and brick and siding and trim colors and stuff like that. And then I've got a folder for vendor references. This is stuff for Pella or Sierra Pacific, for windows and doors. If you have manufacturer PDS that you want to save that you're going to use to reference to create components, you might want a folder like this. Then I've got a folder for finishes. And this is where it's a little bit further broken down into different manufacturers, you know, like Sherman Williams, for instance, here's some that I've pulled in that I've created these materials based off of their pink colors or stain colors, stuff like that. I also have some countertop images. This is some of these are just client photos that we've pulled in for samples to match up with. Different things like that. Let's see, tile we've got some tile references. So however makes sense to you and how you're going to remember to pull from, there's a bunch of different ways that you can set this up. Then we've got materials. So these would be the actual sketch up materials that I've created. When you see my setup inside sketch up, and you're looking at my materials list, this is what it's pulling from. So I have a folder here for construction document materials. So this is where I've got a model going that needs to be gray scale so it can go into layout to turn my model into construction documents. And these are the colors and the finishes that I've found to print really well. I have these. These are, like my go tos for basic construction document models. But then I have other things like paint. So I mentioned Sher and Williams. So you'll see here, I've got a ton that I've collected over time. Now, you're not going to sit down and make all of these at one time. I mean, unless you want to, you can. No one's stopping you from doing that if you have the time. Patients, you can totally do that. But my suggestion is, you're going to build these as you need them. And then that way, when you build them that first time, the next time you need repose gray from Sher Williams, you don't have to make it again. The next time you need portobello for a paint color from Show Wims, you don't have to make it again. You've already made it once and you have it saved. This is like that location that you're just going to build these over time as you go. Let's see, let's look at another one, tile. And if I switch over to icons, you'll see that this is what it kind of looks like. So these are just tile materials in sketch up. You can see the sketch up logo here. That's the file format. So these are materials that I've made. I've taken the image references and then turned them into a material in sketch up and then save them to this file location. And then that's what sketch up is going to reference for my custom libraries. I've also got a folder for components. Once again, you're going to build these over time. You're not going to sit down and just like, Oh, I'm gonna spend 8 hours building cabinets. I mean, you can, but do you really want to? No. Instead, you're going to build a cabinet or a piece of drawer hardware or a piece of furniture or something as you need it, and then you save it in your library so that you don't have to make it the next time. And then you just gradually over time, you'll start building these. I think some of these probably go back to my very first starting models in sketch up. So some of these are probably really old and probably need some help, but you'll just build this up over time. And then I have a folder for style. So these are different sketch up styles that I've created over time, and now sketch up pulls those in so I can just quickly change my style by clicking on this in my library. So this is just my general setup, and now what we're going to do is we're going to create your folder on your system. I'm going to walk you through how I'm going to do that for the purpose of this class and classes moving forward, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a Skillshare folder. So I'm going to hit the new folder icon up here, and I'm just going to call it Skillshare. Okay. And then this will be my go to folder for this class and future classes of anything that we make in a class together or make for a class, I can put it in here so that it's another form of a little custom library. Inside your Skillshare folder, or maybe you're setting it up, you know, from the beginning. So maybe your folder, you're calling it sketch up library. Whatever the case may be, you can name it in, you know, whatever you want to call it. You could call it Bob's library. It's up to you, whatever so think of this. This is Skillshare on my computer. It can be whatever you want on yours. Think of this as this is your file location. This is your go to place. Minus on my D drive sketch up library, and then I'm doing Skillshare. I'm going to create a folder for materials, okay? And I'm going to create a folder for components. And I'm going to create a folder for references. Now, I've given you things for all three of these folders in your class download. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put these side by side here, and now we're going to copy those things. So imagine this is like your download folder on your computer. So what we're going to do is we're going to copy all of these into those designated locations. So these are all image references, so I'm going to take this one. I'm going to hold down Shift and choose this last one. Now, I have these grouped by type. You don't have to. You can have them like this, and you can see the type. You don't have to group them. Whatever makes sense for you. This seems the easiest, so I'm going to group them by type. There we go. All right, so I'm going to take all of these image references, and I'm going to drag and copy them into the reference folder that we just created together. So you can see they're now in here. And then these two right here are sketch up materials, so I'm going to hold down Control to select both of those. So these are materials. I'm going to copy those into the materials folder. And this is a PC that I'm working on, so I don't know if you guys know the difference of this, but if you left click to select and drag it over, sometimes it only gives you the move option, and sometimes it copies but if you do right click and drag, you're going to get the option to choose what you want to do with it. So I'm going to take both of these little components that I've created, and I'm going to copy them into the component folder. And just for this, I'm going to copy this model into here, so it's like basic there. You know what? Let's set up a folder for models. Let's call it sample models. Okay? And I'm just going to move that right in there. Now, you can organize this however you want. You can go into your component folder, and maybe you have a subfolder for cabinets. You have a subfolder for interior elements, anything like that. So if we're comparing this, go back to this. So in my component folder, I've got appliances, casework, details, doors, all this kind of stuff. If you look in these folders, they're broken down even more. So if I go to appliances, I've got beverage and wine centers, coffee makers, cooktops, all of these types of things. So I can further organize everything inside of these libraries. So whenever I pull them in a sketch up, that organization follows through. This This is just an easy way to set this up. This is your locations. So this is where sketch up is going to pull from. So organize it however you need to. You can reorganize it at different times as you get more components, as you get more materials. You know, inside the materials here, you could have a folder for paint and another folder for wallpaper. Anything like that. You can further organize this at a later date. You don't have to do it when you only have two materials, but you could. It's all up to you. But now that we have all of our components and materials set up from our class resources, in the next lesson, we're going to look at creating some new material references to add to these folders so then we can pull those into sketch up to create materials. So I'm going to show you in the next lesson how to take some paint information from Sharon Williams and to create a reference image of that material that sketch up pulls from to create the actual sketch up material. So we're going to create some references together. I'm going to show you how to edit some of those references to get different versions and all of that. So that's going to be in the next lesson. 6. Creating Material References: In this lesson, we're going to look at creating a couple different material reference images and look at editing some. In the class resource folder, I gave you there are a couple tile images, a wood flooring image, and a couple of pink color images, and a patterned wallpaper or textile image. We've already copied those into your reference folder, so you can either pull from there or the original download. But we're going to take a look at creating a pink color image from a real source. In this example, let's say you have a model of a space that you're working on and you want to see how it looks if the walls were painted a specific Sherm Williams color. For that, you need a reference image as the base of your sketch up material. In the resource section of this class, you'll find a link to the Sherm Williams 2025 Color of the Year palette. And in the resource folder, I've given you two color reference images from this particular palette just to give us a starting point. And one of them, I've already turned into a sketch up material for you just as an example. We're going to check out this palette now, and I want you to pick out one of these colors, and we're going to turn it into a sketch up material. We're going to create the reference and then turn it into a material. You can start out with one and do all of them. You can pick a different pink color. It's up to you, but this is just starting point if you want to stick together. I'm going to choose this one, and we're going to look at the details. So here in this section, there's a little drop down. It says full details. And what we're after is this hex code, right here. This is going to be the easiest way to create a color reference. You can do a screenshot of this color, but every screen is going to read color a little bit differently. So if you're going with a hex code, you're a little more true to color throughout. That's how we're going to proceed with this one. In this particular instance, I'm going to use Affinity Photo to create my image reference. You can use any program you can use Photoshop, Affinity Designer or photo. The reason why I picked Photo over designers, because I want to show you a couple of different editing tools. But if you can put a hex code in to create a color and export an image, that's all that matters. So you could use Procreate on your iPad. You can use Canva, on your phone, on your desktop, whatever program you want to do as long as you can achieve that. We're going to start out by creating a file. And I'm going to ignore presets, and I'm just going to choose a pixel size of 800 by 800 and DPI, I like to do 300. And under color, I'm going to choose transparent background. I just like to do this just in case I'm creating a color that needs that. Since we're doing a pink color, you don't need it, but if you just get in that habit, you can do that. And you can also save this as a preset if you wanted. Like, I have a preset saved up here for small sticker, and it has those same settings. If this is the preferred method you want to use, then this might be the best way to go so that you can go through here and, like, save your preset, and you don't have to create this from scratch every time. But since this is such a simple thing, you could. You could either save it or you could just create it from scratch every time. So I'm going to hit Create and now we have our background. I'm going to use the shape tool to create a rectangle. And I have my magnetics turned on. That's these buttons up here, so it snaps to those edges. But you can see in the transform section over here that it is 800 by 800, which is our Canvas size. Now, my hex code, I'm going to copy. And while this is selected up here my colors. I can double click this and I can Control V to paste the hex code and hit Enter. And you can see that now we've created a rectangle with the hex code that matches that pink color. So I'm going to hit Close. And there's our color. All we have left to do is export the image. I'm going to go to File Export. I'm going to leave it as a PNG just because it's fine. And export and I'm going to go to our Skillshare folder that we created earlier. And under references, this is where I'm going to go. And you can think of this as the lazy way to do this if you want, but I like to just select a paint color I already have, and then just because it fills in the colors, it fills in the words, it fills in all of this stuff. Now I just need to put this information in. I'm going to move this to my other screen so I can see it. So the color is mauve finery. The number is 6282, and then the hex code. I'm just going to paste to replace that. And there we go. Now, if I open up our Skillshare folder under references, I can see that it's right here. That means it's ready to go when I want to create that sketch up color. I have this here. If I wanted to create a moodboard for the client that I'm referencing this color for, I now have the image that I can pull on my moodboard, anything like that. It's ready to go. And that's how simple it is to create a material reference, especially for a pink color. That one's the simple one. Next, I'm going to show you a fun tool for editing an image that you already have. So in this case, we're going to look at the hardwood. Okay? I'm going to pull this down here. I can take this hardwood image, the hardwood flooring image, and I'm going to drag it right into Affinity Photo. Now, if I drag it into this existing document that I have opened, then it's going to put it right here on top of this. It's going to be in the same file. That's not what I want. I want the image itself. So I'm going to drag it in up here on the toolbars. And what that does is it pulls it in as a separate document. You could also go to File and Open and find it that way. In this instance, this is just easier. I can just drag it in. I'm also going to grab one of these pink colors. So let's look at let's grab this color. We're going to This is the grounded color. I am going to pull this right in. So you see what I mean? How it pulls it in as on this. I'm going to resize this now, I'm going to show you how easy it is to take this I've got this pink color. We know this color. We see this color. It's an actual Sherlon Williams color. We've matched the hex code. I'm going to show you how easy it is to edit the look of this background image. It says background, but that's our hardwood, right? Just by changing the blend mode. So here here's our color. It's while it's selected. I'm going to go to blend mode and you can choose multiply. And already, you've got a new hardwood image, just that simple, right? I'm going to show you another way to edit this. For this one, I did multiply, okay? Is the paint image that we already have. I'm going to now draw a rectangle. Okay? I'm going to snap it to the middle. And let's go back to this. Because I put the hex code in the file name, I can copy that, control S to copy it, and I can change the color here. Put the hex code. Okay. Now, this option is multiply. If I take this and choose a different blend mode, I can see some other options. The easiest one could be color, ok? If I wanted to go all the way down to color, and I'm going to hold down Control to make a second copy of this. And I'm just going to put this back to normal. So you can see this is if I take that color and do multiply. This is if I do color, and this is obviously just normal. But you can play around with these different options. You can keep this as like a reference. And come up here to this one and like, if this is your color, you want to match. Like, let's say you want a stain color that closely matches your paint color, but not quite. If you set this to color, and this is your original, you can come up here to this and just kind of, like, drag it around and get some other options. Like, if you want it to be close to that, but it's not quite you know, you can play around with these different things. You can also set this let's see. I'm going to use the eyedropper and sample this color so it goes back to it. You could also leave this at normal but then change the opacity. So it just depends on the look that you're going for. But these are easy simple ways to quickly get new colors. So let's go back to Let's go back to 100% and go back to let's look at Hue. See hue doesn't really do anything but color. But that's how you can easily get a different look. So if I wanted to turn off these samples and make this like this, so let's say this color is beautiful. I love it. I want to, you know, keep this color. I could do Export. And this is our hardwood, right? I'm going to change this. We don't want it to be CD stands for construction documents. So instead, I'm going to change this, and I'm going to say, Ooh. Sin. And you could just say brown or you could say stain and then, you know, match match the pink color that you use. You could add the pink color in the file name. Whatever makes sense to you, whatever you're trying to match, if you're trying to match, like an image and, you know, you don't have an actual pink color, but you're changing the color up to match it. Whatever works for putting in the name. But I definitely want to take out the CD that stands for construction document. That's my greyscale color. So do that. Just for another fun example, I could do the same thing with the tile. So if I drag this tile in, I can put a color swatch over it. We're going to change this to color. And then I can start messing around with different colors. And then that's how you get completely different looks completely different looks. Remember, you can always pull in a color if you have a pink color, okay? Do this, resize. That doesn't necessarily matter, but if I do color, I get this. You could play around with any of these other ones. You know, if you're just trying to get something different, you could say vivid light, maybe change that a little bit. See how you can get different colors, different looks to it, just by playing with blend mode and adding some color to it. So see? Alright, let's leave that at color. I mean, that's nice. Alright, now that we have some new image references in the next lesson, we're gonna open up sketchup and start turning those into materials. 7. Creating Custom Materials: Okay. I'm going to start out by creating some cubes to make some shapes to apply materials to. This is just a standard thing that I do whenever I'm looking at some material samples. So I figure let's start out doing that. You can use the rectangle tool and draw shape at 36 by 36 P for push 36. You can also use the rotated rectangle tool. That's this one. I have a keyboard shortcut for Control R. So I'm going to do this at 36 and 36 P for push, 36. So either way, those are two different ways to create a rectangle. I'm going to get rid of this one. I'm going to triple click to select. You can either right click and group, or I have the keyboard shortcut four group set for G. And I'm going to copy a few of these to give us some to play with. Okay, I'm going to go up, and I'm going to give us some to play with, so I'm going to do move and control. And let's say, four X nter No, backspace, five enter. Okay, so that gives us six, and I'm going to make another row of these back here. And this is just going to be some shapes for us to play with. We can apply materials and then quickly save them from here. The reason why I like to group them so that they are all one thing is because that means with one click, I can apply material as opposed to if it was exploded and all just edges and faces to get it all the way around, I would either have to select all of it and apply the material, or I would have to click each individual face. By having them grouped, one click does the whole group. Alright, so let's go over here to our materials panel. If I click the Home button for In Model, you can see that I have no materials in my model. If you've already started playing around with materials, you might see some listed here. And if you have a material selected, it'll show up here. Mine is currently showing the default material. If you ever want to go back to the default material, then you can just click this button, and it will set your current material as the default. For the purpose of this to create a material, we're going to start from the default material. If you had a material selected and you hit this button to create a material, it's going to use whatever selected as your base. So for this, we're going to just use the default. I'm going to hit Create material, and you can see everything you need to create a material from scratch. Under the texture section, I'm going to click the file folder, and we are going to pull up the reference folder. This is in that Skillshare folder that we created together, and then the reference folder. I went through and I made the rest of the pink colors in that Sher Williams palette that I gave you the link for. So we can do any of these. I'm going to start with the one that we made in the previous lesson. So we're going to go with this one. I'm going to select it. You can either double click and select it or select and hit open. And you can see that now this is checked, so use texture image, and it's up here. Now, this is where you would name your material. And since we're doing this for the purpose of saving in our own material library, we want to give it a name. I'm going to go the Easy Route and select this that we already have in the file name, and I'm going to do Control C to copy. And it will give you this pop up window, hit Okay, we're just ignore that. And we are going to replace material, Control V to paste. And so now we have a material that says it is paint. It is from Sharon Williams. This is the color, and this is the color code, and hit Okay. And so now you can see that we've got this paint in the model, while it's still selected, I'm just going to apply it to this cube. And that's how easy it is to turn your reference image into a material that you can use in sketch up. Now, if you want to play around and do a few more, maybe you want to go through and do the whole paint palette that came from that Sheran Williams list. If you want to go through and do the other materials that I haven't already given you in the resource folder, go ahead and do that. I'm going to go ahead and make some of these. We'll do a little time laps. I'll make these, and then we'll be right back to save those materials into our library. All right. Now that I've got all these materials in here, they're in my model. They've been turned into actual materials. Now we need to save them into that file location for our library that we've already set up. It's super easy. All you have to do is we're in model. So I'm going to right click on one of these say Save As, and we're just going to ignore this right here. We're going to go to our folder that we created together. I'm going to go to materials and save. And I'm just going to do the same process for all of these materials, it should bring it up for every single one. Let me enter. All right. So now I have these. And if I pull up that folder that we created together and go to materials, now I've got 14 different materials made in my folder. In the next lesson, I'll give you a quick little look at the difference of applying materials to a group versus faces and how you can customize it in different ways. So we're going to look at that next. 8. Applying Materials to Groups vs Faces: Now that we've created a few materials and we have them in our model, let's talk about the difference between applying materials to groups like what we did in the last lesson versus individual faces. What I'm going to do is take a couple of these, copy them out, and I'm going to reset them to the default material. One of these, I'm going to leave grouped, and the other one, I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut I've set up for Explode, so that's X. And now I've got this one is group, and this one is all edges and faces. And we're going to look at the difference between applying materials. If I copy one of these materials, Okay. And I one click apply it to the group, that's it. We're done. It's applied to the group. And if I go inside of it and select an individual face, you can see up here in entity info that the face is still set to that default material. And that's what allows us to one click and apply a new material. If I were to copy another material and apply it to a single face inside of it, you can see that we get this difference. This one has the default material. This one now has the paint that I applied to it. If I wanted to change this really quickly, let's select this paint. If I one click and apply it, it's going to apply that to everything that had the default material on the inside while leaving this one altered. Sometimes you want that and sometimes you don't find the more you work on models, the more you'll recognize when that's beneficial and when it's not. So I'm going to go back into this, reset it to the default. And I don't know, I kind of like the style. Let's just leave it as that tile. Now on the opposite side of year, with this being all individual faces, if I wanted this material all the way around, I would either have to triple click and apply it. I'm going to do Control Z to get rid of that, or I would have to go through and do each individual face to get that material. Sometimes you want that and sometimes you don't. It just depends on what you're using this for, what you're doing. Let's give you a practical example. Okay, if let's say we've got a tub that's 30 by 60, so I'm going to use the rectangle tool rotated rectangle just because I like it. 60 by lock in this direction 30. Okay. And let's say we've got a tub. We want to do tile for a tile surround. I'm going to use the offset tool, and for me, that's the W keyboard shortcut. I'm going to offset half an inch. Okay? And I'm going to take this front face, and I'm going to move it so that we get one line, and I can delete this. So now this is our tub surround tile. I'm going to pull this up to seven feet. Okay? Here's our tubes surround. We want to apply a tile material to it. If this is a group, I'm going to G for group, if this is a group, I can come in, select my tile and apply it. Done, right? Easy, PZ, the whole thing is done, and I can easily swap it out to another tile, okay? In this scenario, you can't really do anything to edit your material, right? So I'm going to apply let's just get let's just get this one for the purpose of this. If I go inside this group and I select my tile over here, I can apply it to these individual faces, and I can also reposition this. So if I right click on this and say texture position, I can come in here and I can say, Okay, I want my tile to start in the middle instead of over here to the side. So I can come in here and match that up to that midpoint. And I can do the same thing over here. Maybe I don't like how that lines up. I can say texture, position, and move this to the midpoint. So that it lines up a little more seamlessly. When you apply it to the face, that gives you that opportunity to do that. As opposed to the group. You don't have that opportunity. So I'm just going to do the same thing over here and I'm going to shift that to the center. A good example of when you might want to use this is, let's say you want a tile border in here. So I'm going to come through and I'm going to do Shift select to get all three sides. Control to make a copy. I'm going to hit the arrow key up so that I know that it's going vertically. And I'm going to do this. I'm going to copy this up so we create a divide in the material. So now you see if I sell like this, we've got a divide in the material. I'm going to copy these, and we're going to do the same thing. And I'm going to say, actually, let's move this above. So let's see. We're just going to do move. Let's move this to above that grout line. So we have that there. Yeah. And then I'm going to say move, copy. And these square tiles are 12 " tall, so I'm going to say 12. Okay. All right, so now we've got some separation here, okay? So what I'm going to do is I've got this tile selected here, and I can apply this separately because I've divided that material. So you see how that could be really handy for giving you different looks. Whereas if I just apply a material, just choose this one so it'll be obvious. If I apply this to the group, now you can see that all of these faces in the back and edges, they have this new material because those faces were set to default on the inside. Whereas these we applied material specifically to the inside. Hope that makes sense. As you do more models, you will figure out, like when one is more beneficial than the other, and learn which method you want to use. Another good example here is, remember this is all individual. I'm going to set this back to default. If I select one of these wood grains, there may come a time where you want to change directions on your wood. So if this is going this way, let's say you want this one to go this way, because it's applied individually, I can say texture, position, and I can say rotate 90, and, you know, you can line this up if you want. And so now I've got this going one direction and this going another. A good example of when you might want to use this is if you're creating a beam in a space and you want the wood grain to rotate a different direction, this is a simple way to do that. You can also come through and right click texture position. You get these different little grips to choose from. So the red is move. And then the blue means that you can stretch it out. And if you look, you see this little dot right here. I'll move my cursor out of the way, but there's a little dot, and that dot indicates that that is the original ratio, the original proportion. So if you wanted to stick back with that, it kind of locks in that place. The green is your rotate. So you can rotate and once again, you see if I move the cursor out, you've got this blue line that indicates the original proportions. So you can rotate it this way if you wanted it to be a 45 degree angle, but you want it to be with this protrale here, and you could have it go at an angle. Okay? You can also reset it back to the original. And let's look at this one. So this one does a distort. So you can change it up and go in different directions depending on what you need. This one is pretty drastic. But once again, you have that little snapping point of back to the original. You can always reset. You can flip your materials. You can rotate by specific degrees without having to use the green grip. And then you can always reset back to the original, and you can move this around just like I showed you with the tile. So these are some of the differences between applying materials to the group versus individual faces. Another benefit of having the group aspect is, let's say, I've got this shape, and let's group it. And I've got this shape over here. Let's group it and this one over here, group it. Now, these are all individual groups. They all have the default material. If I were to take two of these and make them a group, I can now come in and apply a material to that I call them family groups. So if I apply it to this family of groups, then both of those groups inside get that material because in here, these are set to default, right? A handy way to use this is, let's say you make something and you're like, Oh, really, this should be grouped in with them, so it has the same material. So let's take this. I'm going to do Control X to cut and go into this group, Alt V for paste in place. And now it automatically assumes that material because it's applied to the family. I'm doing finger quotes. You can't see that. But that's a really effective way of redoing groups if you need to redoing materials. An example of this practical example would be, think of a kitchen. So you've got island cabinets, you've got perimeter cabinets, you've got upper cabinets. In the beginning, you may have, each cabinet is a group or a component. We'll get into that more later. But, say, each cabinet is its own group. But then you want the perimeter cabinets all grouped together so they're not just running off all willy nilly and you don't accidentally move them, they're grouped together. You have the upper cabinets, they're grouped together. You have the island cabinets, they're grouped together. You now have three groups that make up those kitchen cabinets. If you group all three of those into a family, then now you can one click and apply a material to those cabinets. And then, let's say you want the perimeter and the island to be the same color, you can pull the upper cabinets out and apply it with its own material. So now you have two families. I hope this makes sense. As we do more models together and create rooms and create spaces, you'll see this more impracticality. But that's a general, you know, general gist of it. You could even, you know, think of these that way. But it's really it's a really handy method of one click and you've changed everything. So I can one click apply it to this family, and now they're all that material. I could take this one out, cut paste. Alt V is my paste in place as opposed to paste. We've reviewed this in other classes before, but very handy. Now let's say these are perimeter cabinets and this is my island and I want my island to be this color. It's really easy to do that. If I want, let's pretend this is an upper cabinet, going to group it. Let's say I want it to be this same color, right? I can cut, go inside here. I still want this to be a group, so I might go ahead and group that. But if I paste in place, now it retains those properties. To me, that's a really easy and effective way to quickly change things without having to apply a color, apply a color, apply a color, apply a color. I hope this gives you a better idea of how to mess around with colors and when you might want to use it for groups versus faces and when you want to combine that. Side note as just another example, I'm going to copy this. This is a group with the material applied to it. If I come in, this handy reminder, if I come in and I explode this, now each individual face, you can see 18 entities. Each individual face now gets that material that was originally in that group. So keep that in mind if you do apply material to a group and then end up exploding it, now all of those properties are in there. And you can see that sometimes your materials may switch around and not be exactly lined up like this. Because your materials align with the axis of your group. I hope that helps. That's kind of a confusing concept until you start seeing it more. But hopefully, this gives you a good idea of these techniques and the process. In the next lesson, we're going to look at taking those new custom materials that we created, all of these, and we are going to set up the locations in sketch up so that we can easily reference those anytime we need them moving forward. Just like what I have here with my built in libraries, I showed you the file locations. Now I'm going to show you how to make that appear in your drop down here in sketch up so that you can easily access that anytime you want. 9. Setting Up Material Library in SketchUp: Okay, we have set up our folder location and added the files for our custom libraries. We've created reference images, we've turned those into sketchu materials. Now it's time to make those materials accessible inside sketch upp so we can use them whenever we need them in the future moving forward. Sketchup starts you off with a few different collections in the favorites list. You can see this here in the dropdown. I've kept those in my drop down list in case there's some I want to use or modify into new materials. I've also built my own library of materials down here and added it to my favorites list, along with a specific subfolder from that same library just for quick reference. When you look at adding a new collection to your favorites list here in sketch upp, if you click on the Details button, you get a couple of different options that we want to talk about and what the differences are. So the first one is open or create a collection. This allows you to navigate to a folder on your system and open a collection inside sketchu, but it's only available in your panel temporarily. Meaning while you're using this particular model. Once you close and reopen, it's gone. It's just a temporary thing that you're just opening it for now. Whereas add collection to your favorites. This means that you're doing the same thing, you're navigating to a folder in your system and you're opening that collection, but it means you're going to add it down here to your favorites list for future use. So this is the option that we want to do. So I'm going to click details. I'm going to say Add collection to favorites. And we're going to navigate to wherever you saved your library before. So I'm going to go to sketch up library, Skillshare, and then materials. Okay? So we're selecting this materials folder. You can either go in it or just select it, but you want to make sure that it says this down here at the bottom, and we're going to say select folder. Now, down here, you can see it shows up right there. Now, if you are like me and you have some different ones and it's a little too confusing, what you could do if you want to rename it, or if you accidentally added one and you didn't mean to, it's like, wrong folder. While you have this selected, which is this little checkmark, you can go back to details and say, remove collection from favorites. And this is where it's going to ask you which one you want to remove. So I'm going to choose this one, remove. And then maybe because I already have an existing one, maybe I want to rename this. So I'm going to copy Skillshare, and I'm going to add this to the front of this Skillshare materials. And I'm going to do the same thing for components, so I don't have to do that again later on. Now, since this is you building your own library, you may not want to do that unless you want it specifically for the classes that we do together. That's up to you. So now let's do that process again, just to walk you through it one more time. Add to favorites, and I'm going to choose Skillshare Skillshare materials, select all right, so now you can see I've got my materials list here. That is my go to. I've got my construction documents folder, which is inside this material. It's right there. So it's just quick reference. But now I can see Skillshare materials right here, and these are all the materials that we have created together in this class. So you can see that it's simple and easy to create your materials, create your locations, and then pull them in here. And I said before, you could organize your folders, and if you do it in the file locations, it's going to show up here. Let's see what that looks like. So if I'm in here, if I want to have a paint folder, Okay? I can take all of these paints that we did together, move them into this paint folder. So now I've got paint, and then you see my construction document ones and wood flooring, they're all just in here. But if I go back to sketchu, go out of this folder and then back in, you can now see that there is a paint folder inside here. Oh, did I miss one? I missed one. Huh. There we go. Paint. So now you can see that if I go in here, go out and back in, and you can see it refreshes. But so now all my paint is right here. And I could do another one for tile, another one for wood, another one for wallpaper, if I wanted to to further organize this. And you can do this at any time. And so let's say you just have a few, you're fine with them being all together, it doesn't matter because of the way that you've named them. They're in alphabetical order. So it's all up to you how you want to do it. And you can change this to your larger thumbnails. You can do list view, refresh. That should avoid going out and back in. But that's how easy it is to pull these in here. So now if I add another one in here into this file location that we've saved, it's going to pop up in that library. And so every time we create a new one, we can just gradually just build and build and build. In the next lesson, we're going to look at creating some new components together before we pull in our component library into sketch up. 10. Creating a Series of Components: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at creating a few different components to start to help building out your libraries, and we are going to talk about how you can use components with other components to create more complex components. But I'm going to start out with talking about the components that I gave you in the class resource section. There are two different ones. First is this simple sphere. And then the other one is a serving tray. So you may recognize that this material is in the class resources that I gave you, as well as this one. They're both in the resource section, so I created those materials, and then I use them on the components that I turned around and gave to you guys. This is just to get you started and to show you some differences. So for this one, we've got a material set up here, a material set up here. And if I turn on my axis, you can see that the axis is centered, I'm going to go underneath. Is centered on the bottom of this in the middle in all directions. Okay? This is your axis, and your axis for your component becomes your insertion point when you go to insert it into a model. On the flip side, let's look at this one. So this sphere is set to the default material, and you'll notice that I've also done the axis is right in the middle at the bottom, centered all the way around, and there's reasons for both of these. So with this one, when you insert this component into a model because it's the default material, you can one click it and apply a new material without having to do anything in particular, you could just match it to anything. Whereas this one, because there are materials already applied to it, when you insert it in, it comes in as is, you don't have to apply material, you don't need to customize it. So you can see how there's benefits to both. If it's an item that you want it to come in as is, you don't want to do anything else to it, then you can apply the materials in that model. As opposed to leaving as the default material. So when you bring it into the model that you're working on, you can apply any color to it, any material to it that you need. As we go through and build the next few components together, I'm going to talk more about why insertion point is extremely important. And I've mentioned it in previous classes, and I will probably mention it anytime we make a component because it makes a difference. If I were to build this component, build this model, and the insertion point was like way over here. So let's say this it's built like this. That means when I insert it in, this point, the origin is where it's going to come in, so most likely I'm going to have to move it again. Whereas if the insertion point is in the middle, just as an example, I could bring this component in and set it directly in the middle of a kitchen table or in the middle of a coffee table or something like that. So insertion point plays a big role when creating components. And when you're building your component library, any model becomes a component. And what I mean by that is, let's go to a blank drawing, okay? This is a blank model. This is the template for the basic model that I gave you guys in this class. I saved it as a template. So if I wanted to bring in a component, bring in an element, I can go over here to my component database, and I can pull in. Let's just pick. I'm just going to pick some random thing. I can pull this in, and it comes directly from my component library over here. Alternately, if I go up to File and Import, and then if I navigate to our class resources and pull in this, it's now a component. Both of these, it's a component if I pull it in from the library. This is a component, if I insert it in file Import. So any model can become a component once you pull it in. The beauty of having this is so you don't have to navigate every time. You can just have this ongoing database of components to pull from anytime you need them. So we're going to create some components together to get you started, to get you in the groove of building something and then saving it as a component and then mixing components together. So I'm going to delete these. And because I know they have materials and stuff in them, I'm going to go up here to model info statistics, and I'm going to purge. So see, I've got five components, two tags, nine materials, and one style. I'm going to purge, and now I've got just the style that I'm in. So it's okay to hit that more than once. This puts me back at a neutral base. So what we're going to do is we're going to build some railing together. We're going to start by building a null post, a simple one, a detailed one, and then we're going to build two different kinds of pickets to go with it. So a basic one and a little more detailed one. And we're going to save those into our component library, and then we're going to make a more complex component by pulling those all in together. So let's look at that. For our null post, I'm going to start out with a rectangle that is 5.5 by 5.5. And remember I talked about insertion point. So I'm gonna pull this in to center up, okay? And I'm going to say 36 " tall. And let's push this down three quarters of an inch because we're going to do a little top cap. So I'm going to take this and I'm G for group. I'm going to draw another rectangle on the top of this, offset 0.75. And we can get rid of this guy, and 0.75, got a little cap group. Do the same thing down here, select this, offset 0.75, and we can push this up 3.5 ". Group. So now we have a simple little null post. Simple as can be. So we've got our top cap. We've got our post, and we've got our little trim piece at the bottom. Now, if you're looking to do something to where you have, like, an example of or maybe like a reference point, like, let's say your railing is going to be at 36 ". Well, that's where the bottom of this is, but maybe you want this to sit a little bit above that. So what if we did 2 "? And then let's push this up. If we copy this, I'm going to select that and copy down those 2 ". While this is selected, I can see let me switch over to K so I can do X ray vision. Alright, I'm going to select that and I'm going to say hide. Okay? If I turn on my hidden geometry, which you can do view hidden geometry or have the shortcut of V, so you can see that the lines are there, but you don't actually see them. So now we have this reference point if we wanted this to sit up above our railing. Like we want our top rail to be even with this and this sits up above it, you know, maybe we want that. Alright, I'm going to turn off hidden geometry. Here's a little trick. We're thinking ahead to our component library over here, right? You see how you get this little thumbnail? The way this works is it takes the center of whatever your screen is, and that is your thumbnail. So when you hit Save, if your null post is over here off to the side, this thumbnail is going to be this center area, so it's not going to see this. So you could do Zoom extents and then maybe zoom out a little bit so that this is in the center. Think of this as like there's a square right here in the middle, and that is what your thumbnail is. So wherever you save this, that is your thumbnail. So now that we've got this, I'm going to do File, Save As, and we are going to navigate to our library here that we've done, we're going to go to Skillshare Components. And I'm going to say railing, underscore, null post simple. Okay? Easy as that, okay? Now we have this saved in our folder. Alright. What we can do from here is we can then go around and customize this and make a new one. So let's say we've got this. We're done. The next day you want to make a new one. You know, maybe your client says, Oh, I need something with a little more pizzazz. Okay? We can do that. We can do Pizzaz. So you would the easiest way is to open this model up again and make your adjustments and do a save as, or save as in the beginning if you're afraid you're going to accidentally overwrite something. So now we've got this, we've saved it. It's there. Let's make a detailed one. I'm going to turn on our hidden geometry, and I'm going to do a guideline. So for me, that is the shortcut for T. And I'm going to do I'm going to say we're thinking our top cap is going to be inch and a half, okay? And then maybe we want another inch and a half here. Inch and a half here. All right. I'm thinking, let's do a little trim piece. What if we pulled this in an inch? Maybe pulled this in an inch. So this gives us a little framework to work from. Also, we need to think about our bottom rail, okay? I want a bottom rail. So if we know this is 3.5, then we've got a bottom rail that's going to be half an inch above this. So let's change this. Let's take this. We're going to go down, move up, half an inch. This is going to be our bottom rail. So we've got an inch and a half, and then we did inch and a half at the top. Okay? So now this is more like what we're meaning. I'm going to draw a rectangle for these guides, and then I'm going to offset that three quarters. Get rid of this middle piece, and then maybe this pops out three quarters. You know, we're just doing something. All right? I'm going to select and group that, and maybe we want to copy this around to the other sides. So I've got it selected, I'm going to do If Move Control to turn it into copy, choosing this endpoint. Snapping it to this, and then I'm going to do for Rotate, and I'm going to rotate it along this line. So now we've got that. That's lovely. This just it's simple, but it's, you know, more complicated. I'm going to copy these. And you can also do something like this where you copy it off to the side, and then maybe you flip it you know, if you want to do that, you could also rotate this way. However, it makes sense to you, you know, there's more than one way to do things if you get lost and you need to try different method. I want to show you a couple of different ways to do that. So now we've got this all the way around, okay? And then maybe we want to make this top just a little more interesting. So let's come up here. Let's offset let's offset to where it lines up with this. And then I'm going to draw an X on top, go to move, and I'm just going to hover around the midpoint here and pull that up an inch. Okay? So now we've got something just a little just a little, you know, just a little something going on up there. And I can delete my guides by going up here to edit, delete guides or Control D deletes those for me. Okay. Once again, I'm going to say Zoom extends. Zoom out a little bit, turn off my hidden geometry, and now I can do File Save As, and I'm just going to say, detailed one. Because maybe at some point, I'm going to have another detailed one. Okay, so now I have two different nel posts in my library. If I go to our component library here, turn this up. So you can see now I've got my starving tray. You see what I mean by the thumbnails? This is what it's going to look like. So I've got my detailed one. I've got my simple one. There you go. Alright. Next, let's do some pickets. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going to say New from template, and I'm just going to choose this basic Skillshare one that I've done. And let's do a basic template for a picket. We don't need it to be anything, you know, crazy. So I'm going to say a rectangle that is 1.5 by 1.5, and I'm going to put it at two feet 5.5 because that'll put it in between my my railings, my top cap, and the bottom rail and top rail. And for this one, it just depends on what makes the most sense to you. I'm going to take this and I'm going to do this because this is going to let me center it on my bottom rail is kind of what I'm thinking. So if it's centered from this one side, I can put it on my bottom rail and then copy it however I need to. So this is going to be our simple little picket. Let's Zoomtens. Zoom out a little bit, file, save as. I'm going to say railing. And we're going to say pick it simple. There you go. Now let's make one that's a little more detailed. It could be maybe you want it to be a little more rounded or something. Okay? So I'm going to take this and let's do a circle that's 0.75. Okay. Well, zoom in. That gives us 1.5 ", right? So now let's do our two feet 5.5 ". And let's do a rectangle. And we're going to create a profile. Let's zoom in a little bit. Okay, so this is going to be the path that we follow. And then this is going to be our profile. So let's see. We could do something simple like, let's copy this down. I'm just literally just making this up. So we're going to say 2 " and then copy this up 2 ". And maybe we want maybe we want these to be a little bit fatter. So let's do an arch so that I did A, and I'm going to pull it there, and I can delete these lines here. Okay, so I've got something just like it's slender and then goes out and then up. Alright, if I select my path and I'm going to do F for follow me and choose my profile, then we've got this little picket. It's okay. It's not the best, but, you know, we're going to go with it. We're going to go with it. And for this one, it might be more beneficial to have the center be there or it could be off to the side. So let's see. Let's do it off to this side like the other one. And here's one trick that could help. If I make this a group, then I can grab one of these points. So it tells me exactly the extents, and I can pull that over to here, and I don't need to be a group anymore, so I can explode it, right? And there you go. There's my picket, and this will help me line it up centering on my rail. Alright, I'm going to I mean, this is obviously not like a masterpiece here. We're just doing a little something. So I'm gonna zoom out a little bit, and we are going to say fall, save as, and then we will do I'm just gonna call this basic. I don't know what to call it. We're just gonna call it basic. All right, there we go. Now we've got in here, we've got some detailed Null posts, simple Null posts, basic and simple little pickets. This one's not my finest work. We're just making this up on the fly. All right. Now let's go to here. Let's just do another one. We're going to new from template, the basic one. Now, because we don't have this setup, that's okay. But we can use those same things like I showed you before about importing in those elements. They're now components. We've essentially turned them into components by making them as models. So if we go to import, and I'm going to choose here. There we go. I'm going to choose our simple null post and see how that insertion point plays in hand. We're going to just snap it right there on the origin. There you go. Lovely, lovely. And I'm going to turn on my hidden geometry. And so this tells me where the top rail needs to be, so I'm going to do a rectangle that is 3.5 by 1.5. And then I can center it here, and we're just going to pull it out, I don't know, 48 ". No, I don't like that. Let's do 36 ". Okay, so here's our top rail. We're just going simple. I'm going to group it, and then I'm going to copy it down here and we're going to move it up half an inch. Alright, so now we have the start of our railing. We can then take this guy, move Cuppy and snap it over here. Okay? Lovely. We've got the start going. Now, if we're saving this as a component, we don't necessarily need this. On the end, this just helps us visualize so we can see where this needs to be. That's just how easy it would be to do that. So let's see. Now, let's import the picket. Let's do the simple one. Okay? And remember the insertion point. That's going to let me pop it in right here. And then I can just pull it over 4 " because that's our clearance. You know, ADA clearance, codes, and all that. So I'm going to do move copy, and then I can do this. Two here, so that's going to give me four inch spacing throughout. So once I click, then I can say six times. There you go. Now we've got something. We don't need this last one. We're just going to There you go. Now, what you could do is if you want this to match, so that if you were to put a new picket a new no post on this end, it would match. So we could say, pull this in and say four, pull this in two there. All right. There you go. Now, if you notice, look, it's in here. That's not what we want. We must have miscalculated somewhere. Because this is a component, because we made this original model, we can edit that and we don't have to start from scratch. Let's see what that looks like. We can see if we measure this. It's like, Oh, quarter of an inch. That's not what we need. We need it to be lowered by one and a quarter. Let's go back to our components. Let's go to our basic picket, open it up. Now we know, we use the wrong measurements. Let's take this down. Inch and a quarter, right? That's what we said. We're going to do Control S for save or file save. And now we can go back to this because we've pulled it in as a component. All we have to do is click on it, say, right click and reload. And we can choose that original one and say open. And now you can see that they've adjusted. So this is what you do you know if you have the original and you're like, Oh, let's do it this size and Oh, that's not quite right. You can open that backup, make a change, and just hit reload. And now you don't have to start over. It's there. You've fixed it. It's good. You're ready to go now. Alright, so I'm going to turn off Xray, and I'm going to turn off hidden. Okay, so now we have our railing element, so we can do File, Save As, and we can call this. We can just say railing simple one, you know, just in case you have another one that you want to do. Okay, so we have our basic railing. And let's say we want to swap this out. Maybe this is lovely, but we want the detailed Newell post. So you could say reload and say, Yeah, I want to switch it and choose detailed. Open. So now it swaps this out and you don't have to do anything else, and you could do file Save As, and you could say simple two. So now you have now you're building your system. Now, if you see these it says SKB, that is the backup file. So you don't really need those. One thing that'll help clear up your library here is just any of these that a SKB Like we've got an SKBtan SKB. Delete those. You don't need those because those aren't actually going to come through in the library that you pull into sketch up. And you just don't need them. You don't need them. But you see how easy it is to swap that out. You could do the same thing if you're in here and you wanted to you wanted to swap this out. You could say reload and choose this one. So now you've got a completely different look. That's how easy it is to change this up and get different looks and not have to start over. I'm going to undo. We're going to leave this as is. Now, if I'm in a model and I'm working on something, so let's say, let's go to a new one. If I want to pull this in, we can import our railing. Let's see. If you get convenience, let's turn this on. So we could pull this in and say, this, put this here. Now, because you have this, if you need another one, you can move, copy, and put that there. And now you have another one. And, if this is all that you need, then you could come in and pull in this again, and we're just going to put it going to put it. Let's see. Let's do. Okay. So pull that there. Pull this here. So now you've got this. And if you're working on a project, this is an easy way to just start building your railings and not have to build everything all at one time, everything, you know, from scratch every time. You just build as you go. We'll get into playing around with these more when we do a little review and start changing things up, we'll mix up the materials and do all that. But this is like a handy way to start building your library and use however many elements that you want, combine components to make something new, it's all very handy, very, very handy. This is why you do it. All right. Now that we've added a few more components to our library, we are going to look at making those libraries show up in sketch up so that you can pull them from here instead of doing file Import every time you need them. So that's going to be our next lesson. 11. Setting Up Components Library in SketchUp: Okay, we have set up our folder locations and pulled in our files for our custom component libraries. We've created a few new components together. Now it's time to make those components accessible inside sketchu so we can use them whenever we need them moving forward. Sketchu starts you off with a few different collections in the favorites list. Yours probably looks different than mine. Most of the ones that sketchup gives you to start out with take you two components in the three D warehouse. I prefer not to use those right inside my model because without downloading those models separately, you don't know what they actually look like, how they're set up, what materials and styles, et cetera, are embedded in the file, or even the units or scale of the model. So I've removed most of those from my favorites list to prevent me from accessing those from this panel and bringing in something into my model that I don't actually want. Instead, I've built my own library of components and added those different collections to my favorites list. If you're looking to remove some of the ones that sketch up automatically pulls in, all you have to do is select the collection and click the Details button and say remove from favorites. I think the only ones that I have kept from the original are the component sampler and the dynamic components training. Don't even ask me why I've kept those. I just have. The rest of these are mine that I have been building and just they've just accumulated over time. When we're looking at the details options, if you have a component collection selected, you'll see options for open or create a collection, add to favorites, remove the favorites. Just like with the materials, there's some differences. So if you click Open and Create a local collection, you're going to navigate to the folder in your system that you want. Choose the folder for your collections, and it will pull it in, but it's just temporary. You're going to have to open that and then choose Add to favorites in order to make it actually go in this list. So let's do that now. Let's click on Details open and create a local collection, and we are going to go to our scheduled library, Skillshare, and I'm going to choose Skillshare components. This is the folder that we've been making together, so I'm going to select it. And while it's selected, I'm going to say add to favorites. And what that's going to do is it's going to put it at the bottom. You can't rearrange these. So if you want these to be in a certain order, then what you would need to do is click on them and remove from favorites and then start adding them again. I've done these in alphabetical order, but let's say I created a new collection that started with an M and it would go above or below this. If I wanted it to stay in alphabetical order, I would need to remove these from favorites and then add them back in alphabetical order. So it just depends on your personal preferences for that. If you don't want them in alphabetical order and you have a different order that makes sense to you, then add them to your favorites in that order. And you can always remove and add and remove and add however many times you need to get the order that you want. And just like with the materials, if you wanted to further organize this in your folder here, you can add another folder, like maybe you want a folder for railing. Maybe you want a folder for shapes, maybe you want one for decor, anything like that. So the more components you add to your collection, here in the file location, the more you might want to organize them. If you just have a few, it's not a big deal right away. And this is something that you just add to over time. I've got, I don't know, like thousands at this point. And so you'll just add to them as you need them, and the more you add to them, the less you need to create stuff in the future, because you'll have stuff to pull from. But you can see how simple and easy it is. Once you have all of the prep work done, you can just easily pull it in. And now I have Skillshare components listed here in my favorites list. In the next lesson, we're going to look at bringing some of our new components and our materials together and ways to play around with that. 12. Bringing It All Together: In this lesson, we're going to bring all the stuff that we've talked about in this class together and play around with some of our components and take a look at applying materials and doing different groups and things like that, and just like a little review of everything that we've done. So we've got our components all set up in here. Let's play around with some of the railing elements. So if I pull this in and I'm going to pull in a post, and let's line it up with this one and center it with all of this. Let me see. All right. I'm going to show you a trick of if we copy this, we are going to flip it along the red and pull this into here. Okay. Let's say you've got railing here. This is its own thing. These are components. They are matching. So you can see that if I select this up here, it says component two in the model. So if I select this one, two, we've got two components, two and models. So that's how we know what that is. But let's say, Oh, we really need another picket. It needs to be a little bit wider. So if we pull this, let's go inside of this. And once we're editing this, you can see that this highlights. We're editing both sides at the same time. So let's go in and let's add another two of these, and then we're going to select it and we can pull this out U here. And then we can edit this. I'm just going to well, let's do it this way. You can either use the scale or you can edit it in here like this. But by doing one side, and it's a component, then it's matching up the other side. Okay. And let's say you want to edit this Null post and do a it something different. Let's go in here and see this it says we have one in here, and this it says we have two. So what we could do is we could copy this one and replace it here if we wanted all three to match or if we're just wanting this one to be different, we can just edit this one. So let's say, I'm going to draw a line on top, and then I'm going to pull in our sphere and put it on there, and I can get rid of this. And now we've got, maybe that's a light. I don't know. Playing around with it. Now, if this is our railing, if I group it, now it's like a family group, like what I talked about before, and I can come in here and pick a material and apply it to it. Let's say, maybe I want the whole thing to be this, but what if the pickets were different? If I group those and then come in and choose another color and paint those, then I get a different look, right? So this is ways you can play around with materials and your components and just creating different things. And it's fun. It's fun. I can take this guy and copy over here, rotate, do that same sort of thing. You know, I can use our components. Let's pull in this. I can, you know, stick a tray on here if I want to. And it's just it's fun. So having these components in our own little library means that we don't have to make these anytime we want them. And what if we did this? Like, Oh, let's go with, you know, the more detailed Null post. Let's swap this out. And then, really want this one to match. So let's let's take this. I'm going to copy. And I'm going to reload this with this guy. And now, because it's the same thing, there's five of them in here. And then I could paste that and get a little something different, right? And now they all match. How fun is that? You could also come in and take these guys, select it. I'm going to group these. And then what if I wanted this to match that? I don't know. I'm just playing around, but, you know, that's how you could do it. Hopefully, this gives you some ideas of some different things that you can do, some different ways you can use components and materials. In our final lesson, we're going to wrap things up and talk about your class project and what we can look forward to next. 13. Review and Projects: That's a wrap for this class. I hope that you guys have enjoyed getting to know more about materials and components and how easy it is to get started and work on building your own custom libraries. Hopefully, you've got a lot out of this class, and I can't wait to see your projects. I want you guys to have fun creating new materials. Create some components of your own, come up with a clever way to display some of the materials that you create throughout the course of this study. I've already started making plans for our next class and potentially series of classes, and I've gotten some great feedback from people on my YouTube channel, from the planning side of things. So there's some fun things in the works, and I can't wait to explore more of this with you if you have any requests for topics or models or anything dealing with the classes, anything you need help with, anything you want to see, feel free to reach out to me either through Skillshare, through my website, through my social media, anything like that. I look forward to doing more classes with you guys. And thank you so much for making it all the way through to the end of this class and sticking around for this lesson. I love using this program, and there's so much you can do with it in so many different ways, and I look forward to exploring all of that with you guys. Until next time.